Shazam is a commercial service that was founded back in 1999 by Chris Barton, Philip Inghelbrecht, Avery Wang and Dhiraj Mukherjee. Shazam recently rose to quite some fame, thanks to their music identification app service, that is based for mobile devices. Shazam has their headquarters in London.

The way Shazam works is quite interesting. Shazam makes use of the internal built in microphone of a mobile phone to listen to the music that is being played in the background. The Shazam app, then gathers a sample of the music with the help of the microphone. The app then compares the sample music it gathered with the help of the microphone, with its central database to find a match for the music.

In case it finds a match for the song it recorded using the microphone, the app then shows off information about the song such as the artist that sang the song, the title of the song, and also the album cover of the music. The Shazam app works in coordination with other apps such as iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, Zune etc., to find and display information such as album cover, singer details, lyrics etc., to the user.

Features of Shazam App:

The Shazam app is free and supports almost every popular mobile operating systems such as iOS, Android and Windows Phone. The app is free to download from the respective app stores such as the Google Play Store, the Apple App Store and Windows Phone etc.

However, to access their full database, to use their service above the limited frame for free users and to access certain premium features, you will be asked to become a premium member of the Shazam music identification service.

Even though the Shazam music identification app is able to identify music in almost every major language, there had been a major update to the service in 2012 that lets users from the US to access featured music section and also cast information as well. It also allows users to find related information online and allows them to share their findings to popular social media and social networking sites as well.